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Written by: Vanessa Taylor
A short time ago, we shared an analysis of how PR and marketing should combine to produce optimum brand visibility in the age of LLMs. How earned media fuels off-site authority signals -> while SEO ensures that owned content reflects and reinforces those narratives -> and organic social and paid media can extend those narratives’ reach and impact -> and events and influencer partnerships can then elevate those narratives into high-profile brand experiences.
The potential in this integrated approach is incredibly exciting.
…And if you’re a small business, startup or nonprofit, perhaps incredibly overwhelming.
Trying to wrap your head around LLM search on its own is challenge enough. Deciding how you’ll feed a multi-disciplinary marketing engine might be too much (for now).
But here’s the good news: while a multi-disciplinary approach is absolutely ideal, the key to making it successful is focus.
What we know right now is mentions in publications, influencer mentions, and third-party reviews all directly shape how answer engines describe your brand. Why should you care? Well for one thing, LLM referrals are the highest-converting traffic source, with an approximate 18% conversion rate, and they’ve completed upended web traffic and the ways users not only source information, but make decisions.
\Good to Know: Earned media placements are essential to AI representation, which means you need great pitch content. According to Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism report, 40% journalists value original data or research and 37% want high-resolution images. 46% specifically serve a local community, 45% look for clear local or cultural context in the pitches they receive, and 28% value including voices from the impacted community. In short, if you want earned media, focus on providing proprietary data, solid imagery and ways to describe your impact on a specific community.
To be consistently cited in AI search, a brand – be it an organization or an individual thought leader – needs to fuel a healthy stream of bylined articles, interviews, data-driven reports, executive commentary and owned content.
But without a clearly defined authority territory, that stream will fail to establish you as highly-recommendable leader in any space. In other words, as much as possible, your content needs to align around a single focus and reinforce the same themes for LLMs to cite you in positive, recurring ways
You don’t have to be the leader in every subject.
In fact, it will serve you much better to be the leader in one or two. So here’s what you do to uncover your focus area:
- Conduct a deep dive into your business. Where are the most sustainable market opportunities? They might be pretty niche, and that could be a great thing for the differentiation of your brand or expertise. Then –
- Review how you and your competitors are described across LLMs. Are the descriptions accurate? Are there gaps? Which elements do you wish received greater emphasis, and why? Then –
- Read industry media (trades, not just nationals) to uncover trends in topics or types of content. What are they covering? What are the ways you could meaningfully contribute to the conversation, beyond just promoting what you do? Then –
- Find the intersection of these learnings and build a content calendar for earned and owned media with a single authority territory that guides every piece – the ideas you want to pitch to journalists and the focused subjects you want to dominate on your website, in your newsletter, on your LinkedIn, etc. Figure out how create your own relevant research, and plan to tell your story through a combination of text, images and topical video.
Or ...
- Find seasoned PR practitioners who specialize in focused PR work and will conduct this research, interpret it, package it into a strategy, and deploy it for you in manageable phases. That will work too.
Right now, AI is determining who gets seen and who gets overlooked. Focus isn’t a limitation; it’s potentially your greatest competitive advantage. The businesses that win in LLM search won’t be the ones who said the most. They’ll be the ones who said the right things, consistently, in the right places. So start small, go deep, and let your authority territory do the heavy lifting.
This post originally appeared on www.matternow.com.
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